Speed Up Your Requisition Approvals!
A healthy, nimble and efficient requisition process is absolutely essential to your business. If your QAD environment is experiencing process bottlenecks and slow approvals, it can result in delayed purchases of necessary goods and services, higher costs, and frustrated employees — and it can impact your bottom line.
Most experts agree that there are several best practices for a quick, well-functioning and agile requisition to order process that companies would do well to employ.
Here are some things that you can do.
- Adopt electronic requisitioning with automatic approval routing and the ability to add supporting documentation.
- Provide access to requisition information – anytime and anywhere – that includes all the necessary information that is needed by approvers.
- Build an approval hierarchy that makes the most sense for your business based on dollar amounts, projects, GL accounts, and/or budgets.
- Develop approval workflows that are easy to maintain, such as approvals based on position so organizational changes require minimal maintenance.
- Set up email alerts and reminders to prompt timely action.
- Avoid bottlenecks by assigning alternate approvers when the primary approver is unavailable.
- Encourage and facilitate the use of preferred vendors
When one of our clients became a public company, their auditors insisted on tighter controls over their procurement cycle. QAD users since 2007, they knew they would need to improve the ease of use, visibility and control beyond what QAD GRS enables, so they began to look for a third-party solution. After evaluating several options, they chose 32 Soft’s Online Requisition System.
Our Online Requisition System has several key features which give this client both the control and the flexibility they needed in their requisition to buy cycle.
First, it allows both QAD and non-QAD users the ability to see requisitions as a whole — including all documentation. Even non-QAD users can follow the lifespan of a requisition without having to know and understand the QAD system. Since only the next approval level is presented, they don’t need to know all of the approvers.
Additionally, our client likes how users can get status updates and approve requisitions on multiple devices, so requisitions can be updated on the go. Plus, an auto-notification email feature ensures that the cycle time of approvals is reduced.
We were also able to customize the system to fit our client’s purchasing process and approval hierarchy. Customization involved their whole team – Purchasing, AP, Accounting, Operations, IT, HR, SLT, R&D, Engineering – because everyone can and does use the system.
The Business Analyst who spearheaded the project relates that everyone is happy with the system. “The AP folks like the control it gives them and the managers like that the 32 Soft system makes it so easy – they can securely access the system on their mobile devices for status reports and approvals and don’t have to worry about logging into and using QAD.”
Currently, this client is evaluating our upgrade system called Requisition Plus because of its added feature that allows buyers to create purchase orders within the application rather than creating them in QAD. They can even create POs right from their smartphones – and the purchase order information updates to QAD automatically.
Requisition Plus is an independent stand-alone system but uses a safe and secure CIM load interface which uses genuine QAD logic to communicate with and update their QAD system. So, information is always current and updated in QAD correctly and without data errors.
It is critical to have an approval cycle that operates at the same speed as your business, your customers and your employees. Requisition Plus can help you do exactly that.
